Atheism, Evolution, Skepticism

Blog the Religions

I’ve been listening to John Hummel’s 52 Weeks, 52 Religions podcast lately. He’s a former Mormon who’s out doing interviews with religious groups around Tampa Florida. About half of his interviews are with various Christian denominations, but he includes Muslims, Jews, Satanists, Pagans, etc in his podcast. It’s interesting stuff if you like hearing people talk about their religious beliefs.

One of the questions that he asks people during the interview is: “do you think the world is getting better, worse, or is it just as it’s always been?” One thing that’s struck me is that virtually every Christian group says that the world is getting worse. Most non-Christian groups seem to pick “better” or “same as always”. It’s remarkably pessimistic of Christians. Afterall, the human condition – in terms of education, health, lifespan, free-time, entertainment, etc – is far better in modern times than it has ever been in history. It seems that the Christian groups don’t really care about those things so much as being completely focused on people following their conservative version of morality and belief in Christianity. I suppose it could also have to do with Christian eschatology – since they believe the world will go to shit before Jesus returns.

His website is available here. The podcast only contains the last 10 episodes, but they’re all available on his blog.

It seems that the Christian groups don’t really care about those things so much as being completely focused on people following their conservative version of morality and belief in Christianity.

I don’t think that’s it. Or rather, I think that’s a side effect and not a root cause.

There have always been people who were positive that sometime in the past there was a wonderful Golden Age and that as we get further and further from that time, things get worse. It doesn’t matter if things seem objectively better now than they were a century ago, or fifty years ago, or whatever. What matters is that once things were perfect and now they’re not.

Christianity has made this a tenet of faith with the whole idea of The Fall. But the Greeks believed something pretty much the same and independent of the Hebrew scriptures. (I wonder sometimes if there was cross-pollination one way or the other, or if they both developed it independently. I could see it working either way.)

I personally think it comes from the fact that when we’re kids things are “objectively” better than when we’re adults. Most of us have few worries, our world is sufficiently small in size that there are few “mysteries” about it, and we have protectors who guard us from anything bad that could happen to us. As we get older we find out that the world isn’t like that at all, and to some degree with miss the security of that world. The more well off a society is, the more that attitude breeds. My suspicion is that the whole idea of a Golden Age and “times were better then” attitude is a projection of that insecurity onto the world as a whole.

(I’ve also noticed that the more conservative someone is, the more they believe that “times were better/simpler back then”. I think that’s just inherent in conservatism as a whole – they hate/fear change and want it to happen as little as possible. The past was better for them because no one argued about the stuff that people want to change now – everyone agreed with the “conservative” position. Hence better.)

Yeah, you might be right about that. There certainly is an idealism about the past.

I personally think it comes from the fact that when we’re kids things are “objectively” better than when we’re adults. Most of us have few worries, our world is sufficiently small in size that there are few “mysteries” about it, and we have protectors who guard us from anything bad that could happen to us.

Speaking of which, I’ve wondered in the past if some theist’s “experience” of God is really a remembrance or yearning for what things were like as a child. There are certainly some parallels: As children, Mom and Dad watched over and protected us, they made everything better, they knew what was best for us, they knew what was going on even if we didn’t, they sometimes answered our requests, they wanted us to “do the right thing”. It parallels people’s ideas about God. Heck, you could even point out the parallels between the devil and the scary things in the night – the boogeyman, monsters under the bed. (And maybe the reason theists think that they “feel God’s presence” is that the idea of God conjures up memories from childhood, so the idea of a benevolent God looking over them somehow feels familiar and “right”.)

I’ve even noticed that people with stern or harsh parents tended to have a similar concept of God. For example, Fred Phelps (of “God hates Fags” fame) was physically abused as a child, and was physically abusive to his own children. He and his children also believe in a very harsh rule-giver God.